Ireland’s Bloody History – Portadown massacre November 1641

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Portadown Massacre November 1641

The Portadown massacre took place in November 1641 at Portadown, County Armagh, during the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Irish Catholic rebels, likely under the command of Toole McCann, killed about 100 Protestant settlers by forcing them off the bridge into the River Bann and shooting those who tried to swim to safety.

The settlers were being marched east from a prison camp at Loughgall. This was the biggest massacre of Protestants during the rebellion, and one of the bloodiest during the Irish Confederate Wars. The Portadown massacre, and others like it, terrified Protestants in Ireland and Great Britain, and were used to justify the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and later to lobby against Catholic rights.

Engraving of the Portadown Massacre (1641) by Wenceslaus Hollar, first published in James Cranford’s Teares of Ireland (London, 1642)

Background

The Irish rebellion had broken out in Ulster on 23 October 1641. It began as an attempted coup d’état by Catholic gentry and military officers, who tried to seize control of the English administration in Ireland. They wanted to force King Charles I to negotiate an end to anti-Catholic discrimination, and greater Irish self-governance, and to partially or fully reverse the plantations of Ireland. Many of those involved in the rebellion had lost their ancestral lands over the past thirty years in the plantation of Ulster.

Most of the land at Portadown had belonged to the McCanns (Mac Cana), a Gaelic clan. As part of the plantation, this land was confiscated by the English Crown and colonized by English and Scottish Protestant settlers.

 Rebels, including the McCanns, captured Portadown on the first day of the rebellion along with nearby settlements such as Tandragee and Charlemont.  

Some of the rebels began attacking and robbing Protestant settlers, although rebel leaders tried to stop this. Irish historian Nicholas Canny suggests that the violence escalated after a failed rebel assault on Lisnagarvey in November 1641, after which the settlers killed several hundred captured rebels. Canny writes,

“the bloody mindedness of the settlers in taking revenge when they gained the upper hand in battle seems to have made such a deep impression on the insurgents that, as one deponent put it, ‘the slaughter of the English’ could be dated from this encounter”.

Massacre

Portadown Massacre

Twenty-eight people made statements about the incident, but only one of them witnessed it. The others related what they had heard about it, including possibly from some of the rebels themselves.

William Clarke, the only survivor, stated that he had been held in a prison camp at Loughgall, where many of the prisoners were mistreated and some subjected to half-hangings. The rebels in the Loughgall area were commanded by Manus O’Cane. Clarke states that he and about 100 other prisoners were marched six miles to the bridge over the River Bann at Portadown. The wooden bridge had been broken in the middle. Threatened with swords and pikes, Clarke states the prisoners were stripped, and then forced off the bridge and into the cold river below. Those who tried to swim to safety were shot with muskets. Clarke claimed he was able to escape by bribing the rebels.

The massacre seems to have happened in mid-November. It is likely that the prisoners were being brought to the coast to be deported to Britain, and rebel leader Felim O’Neill had already sent other such convoys safely to Carrickfergus and Newry.

Sir Felim O’Neill of Kinard.

 Toole McCann was the rebel captain in charge of the Portadown area at the time, and several people made statements that he was responsible for the massacre. Hilary Simms writes:

“The convoy entered his area of control and it would seem likely that even if he did not order it, he and his men could not have avoided being involved in it”.

 Native Irish tenants had already been massacred at Castlereagh, but Pádraig Lenihan writes there is no direct evidence the Portadown massacre was retaliation for this.

Aftermath

As word of the massacre spread, “elements of what happened were exaggerated, tweaked and fabricated”. People who heard about the massacre gave a range of death tolls, from 68 to 196. As Clarke was a witness of the massacre his figure of 100 is taken as being the most credible. Nevertheless, the Portadown massacre was one of the bloodiest in Ireland during the Irish Confederate Wars. About 4,000 Protestant settlers were killed in Ulster in the early months of the rebellion.

Irish Confederate Wars

 In County Armagh, recent research has shown that about 1,250 Protestants were killed, about a quarter of the settler population there. In County Tyrone, modern research has identified three blackspots for the killing of settlers, with the worst being near Kinard, “where most of the British families planted … were ultimately murdered”.

There were also massacres of local Catholics, such as at Islandmagee in County Antrim,  and on Rathlin Island by Scottish Covenanter soldiers. Though a supporter of British rule in Ireland, 19th-century historian William Lecky wrote:

 “it is far from clear on which side the balance of cruelty rests”.

The massacre terrified Protestant settlers and was used to support the view that the rebellion was a Catholic conspiracy to massacre all Protestants in Ireland, though in truth such massacres were mostly confined to Ulster.

John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion (1646)

 In 1642, a commission of inquiry was held into the killings of settlers. Protestant bishop Henry Jones led the inquiry and read out some of the evidence to the English parliament in March 1642, although most of his speech was based on hearsay. The massacre featured prominently in English Parliamentarian atrocity propaganda in the 1640s, most famously in John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion (1646). Temple used the massacres at Portadown and elsewhere to lobby for the military re-conquest of Ireland and the segregation of Irish Catholics from Protestant settlers in Ireland.

 Accounts of the massacre strengthened the resolve of many Parliamentarians to re-conquer Ireland, which they did in 1649–52. Massacres were committed by Oliver Cromwell’s army during this conquest, and it resulted in the confiscation of most Catholic-owned land and mass deportations. Temple’s work was published at least ten times between 1646 and 1812. The graphic massacres depicted therein were used to lobby against granting more rights to Catholics.

After the massacre, stories spread of ghosts appearing in the river at Portadown, screeching and crying out for revenge. These stories were said to have struck fear into the locals. One woman stated that Irish Confederate commander Owen Roe O’Neill went to the site of the massacre when he returned to Ireland in 1642. She stated that a female ghost appeared, crying for revenge. O’Neill sent for a priest to speak to the ghost, but it would only speak to a Protestant cleric from an English regiment

Toole McCann was later captured by English forces. He was questioned and made a statement in May 1653, saying he had not authorised nor seen the massacre, but had only heard of it. He was executed shortly after.

My thoughts ?

Regardless of your political opinion and how you view modern day Ireland and the bloody never-ending consequences of partition and the creation of Northern Ireland, I’m sure we can all agree that our beautiful wee green island has suffered more than its fair share of heartache, misery and political and religious abuse over the centuries.

Whilst many are familiar with recent history and the thirty years of sectarian and political violence we all endured – the seeds of these conflicts had been brewing and stewing for hundreds of years and finally boiled over into “civil ” war in the late 1960s.

From the time when the Vikings first arrived and began raiding in AD 795 to the modern-day Troubles Ireland has never known a lasting peace and our past is littered with the ghosts and memories of countless wars and battles that have left scars and wounds which still fester to this day and are part of our collective ancestral heritage.

In his quest for a United Ireland Brian Boru was arguably the most successful of many leaders who tried previously to bond the warring tribes against the Vikings marauders and those tribes aligned with them. The Battle of Clontarf is one of the greatest battles in Irish history, were an estimate 7,000 – 10,000 men and tribal leaders were killed in the brutal clash that day. Centuries of rule and misrule under various English, Scottish and European parliaments followed until we arrive in the 1960’s and the beginning of the modern Troubles.

I’ve covered the modern Troubles extensively on my blog and if you are interested it has a searchable database of every major event and killing during those dark days. But as a lover of history I thought I would share stories of some of the less well known conflicts and battles that have caught my attention throughout the years and ultimately led to the Ireland, north and south we know and love today.

John Chambers

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Battle of Clontarf, 1014 – End of the Viking Age in Ireland

See also

See: Battle of Clontarf, 1014

See : Wiki Portadown massacre

See: Massacre of Mullaghmast

See: List of massacres in Ireland

See: List of conflicts in Ireland

See: Rathlin Island

See : Battle of the Boyne

See: Siege of Derry

Main source: Wiki

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